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Issue link: https://digital.macdirectory.com/i/62609
DEPARTMENT BEEBE > MACDIRECTORY'S TECH GODDESS Q>I am not a fan of the black background and photo chapter page motif of iBooks Author's Astronomy theme. How do I get rid of it? – W. Wilhelm, Nevada A>Go to the View menu and select "Show Layouts." Select the chapter master page at the top of the left column. Click on the offending element in the main window, the go to the Arrange menu and select "Unlock." Delete the element. A red "apply" label will appear on the chapter master page. Click on it to apply the change on all the pages based on the chapter page. This trick can also be applied to master page items such as a vertical rule between columns, but this is even easier. The locked rule in this example displays an X at each end of the rule when you select it. Just select it, go to the Arrange menu and select "unlock." Q> Whenever I do a Spotlight search the results are choked with email hits. I go to Spotlight prefs in Lion, the option to deselect mail messages is no longer there. If I deselect Messages and Chats, the mail hits still appear. What do I do? – K. Simms, California A>This relates to my pet peeve with certain brainy software outfits who have never gotten around to installing baby catchers on their bathwater drains. It seems to me that search customization should include such things as file type / is not / but that's just me. (My Adobe favorite: the text > tabs menu item in AI CS5 did not open the tab palette for editing text, but controlled the visibility of all the tabbed pal ettes.) What you do (but shouldn't have to) to fix this is to do a search that is certain to snag emails. Click on an email in the search window and look at the file path at the bottom of the window, then locate "library > mail >" Go to System Preferences > Spotlight prefs > Privacy. Drag the above-mentioned mail folder into the privacy window. This will remove the mail hits from the search window. If you have any other library folders on other mounted hard drives, repeat the process. Q>I keep trying to type in a certain URL in Safari but it tacks a bunch of other stuff onto the address and takes me somewhere else. No matter what I do, this keeps happening. What do I do? – R. Mair, Delaware A>Sounds like your browser is being a bit too helpful by trying to guess where you want to go based on where you have been in the past. These past lives are stored in your browser's history and cache files. In Safari you can go to the Safari menu and select "empty cache." If this does not do the trick, go to the history menu and select "clear history." If you are using Firefox, go to the tools menu and select "clear recent history." In the panel that pops up, click on the details button and check the boxes for cache and history. While you're at it, if you have a similar issue with favorites or bookmarks, delete the bookmark in question, go to the desired site then recreate the bookmark. Q>I am running out of drive space and am going to have to buy an external drive. Any suggestions? – P. Menolo, California A>There are a couple of things you need to bear in mind. One is that all hard drives eventually die. This means that you may actually need to buy more than one drive so that you will have a place to backup your data in anticipation of that fateful day of shock and dismay that will surely come. My recommendation is that you buy a drive that is stackable and that is likely to be on the market for years to come. Another option is to buy a small JBOD (just a bunch of independent drives) multi-drive array of two or more hot- swappable drives and a number of extra drive sleds. You can use one drive for data and the other for backups. Once a drive is full, buy a couple more bare drives, bolt them onto the spare sleds and pop 'em into the array. If you ever need to access data off an older drive, just do a quick swap. 26 MacDirectory